The untapped potential of parking lots

In an op-ed article in The New York Times, Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at MIT, insists that people should take parking lots more seriously. He writes:

We need to redefine what we mean by “parking lot” to include something that not only allows a driver to park his car, but also offers a variety of other public uses, mitigates its effect on the environment and gives greater consideration to aesthetics and architectural context.

There are estimated to be three nonresidentialparking spaces for every car in the US. That amounts to nearly 800 million parking spaces, covering about 4,360 square miles.

In some places, parking lots are used at least part of the time for farmers' markets and other activities. Citing examples of imaginatively designed parking lots, including one at the Dia museum in Beacon, New York, Ben-Joseph says parkings lots can be something better than "an ugly reminder of the costs of our automobile-oriented society."

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